From Willoughby to Pasadena: South grad Randy Hart has led interesting football life

He was the first big-time football recruit to come out of South High School, and one of the first to emerge from Lake County.
He played for Woody Hayes on the 1968 Ohio State national championship team, and for the last 44 years he has been prowling the sidelines as one of the most accomplished college football coaches in the country.
Today in the Rose Bowl, Randy Hart will be on the sidelines again, doing what he does best.
Coaching football.
Hart, 65, is in his fourth season as the defensive line coach at Stanford, which will play Michigan State in today’s Rose Bowl.
During the course of his coaching career, Hart has been an assistant coach at some of the nation’s top programs and he has worked under some of the biggest names in the sport, including Hayes, Earle Bruce, Don James and Charlie Weis.
Four years ago, he was hired at Stanford by Jim Harbaugh.
Hart has coached for so long, in so many different places, with so many different coaches he’s constantly reminded of the tracks he’s left. Today in the Rose Bowl, for example, he can gaze across the field at Michigan State coach Mark D’Antonio, who from 1983 to 1984 was a graduate assistant on the Ohio State staff on which Hart was the defensive line coach.
That’s not to be confused with two other grad assistants who worked on the staff at Ohio State with Hart in the mid-1980s. Their names are Urban Meyer and Nick Saban.
Perhaps you’ve heard of them.
“It’s been a great run,” Hart said. “Coaching is all I’ve ever wanted to do. I get to work with a bunch of 18 to 24 year olds. I feel like I’m still 24.”
He acts like it, too.
“He’s got more energy than just about anyone out here, and he’s the oldest guy here,” Stanford defensive end Ben Gardner said. “That tells you how much he loves the game and how passionate he is about it.”
His love of the game began in Willoughby, in the mid-1960s, when Hart surfaced as a five-star recruit — though there were no such designations or scouting services then — at South, as a fullback/linebacker.
One of the offensive linemen for South at the time was Frank Platzar, Hart’s brother-in-law and now the athletic director at Notre Dame-Cathedral Latin.
“I blocked for him, and he was twice my size,” Platzar said. “He was also stronger and faster than I was.”
Hart was a must-have recruit for Ohio State, so that led to a visit from Woody Hayes, on Thanksgiving Day, 1965.
“He was in Cleveland for the high school city championship game, and after the game he called me and asked if we minded if he stopped by,” Hart said. “I said, ‘Sure, come on over.’ We had about 20 or 30 people at the house, and they all took off yelling, ‘Woody’s coming!’ ”
Wendy Platzar, Frank’s wife and Randy’s sister, remembers the day well.
“One of my cousins ran to our neighbor’s house and told them, ‘Willie Mays is coming to our house!’ ” she said.
The visit from Hayes — not Mays — went well, and Hart committed to Ohio State.
“It was really a big deal that a guy from South was going to Ohio State,” said Bob Quirk, who played on Hart’s team at South.
For the Buckeyes, Hart was an offensive lineman on the 1968 national championship team that went 10-0, including a 27-16 win over USC in the Rose Bowl.
“Playing for Woody was the greatest experience of my life,” Hart said. “He was a great people manager. For me he was a coach, a teacher and a mentor. He was always about the academics. Once you got your degree he’d say, ‘Go get your masters.’ When you got that he’d say, ‘Now go get your Ph.D.’ He really cared about his players. That’s why he coached. It wasn’t for the money. He never asked for a raise in 28 years at Ohio State. Some coaches resented that, because they figured if Woody wasn’t asking for a raise, how could they?”
After his playing career, Hart immediately went into coaching. In 1970 and 1971, he was a graduate assistant at Ohio State. In 1972, he was the offensive line coach at the University of Tampa, under Earle Bruce, who later succeeded Hayes at Ohio State.
“Earle was like a father figure to me. To this day I still talk to him regularly,” Hart said.
When Bruce got the head coaching job at Iowa State in 1973, he took Hart with him. From 1977 to 1981, Hart was an assistant at Purdue under head coach Jim Young. Then it was back to Ohio State from 1982 to 1987, where Hart was an assistant under Bruce again.
Then Hart went west, to the University of Washington. From 1988 to 2008 he was the defensive line coach, defensive coordinator and assistant head coach under Don James. In 1991, the Huskies won the national championship, and in his 21 years at Washington, Hart coached 14 first-team All-Pac 10 players, four All-Americans and 11 players selected in the NFL draft, including defensive end Steve Emtman, who was the first overall pick in the 1992 NFL draft.
In 2009, Hart coached for a year at Notre Dame under Weis, and the next year Harbaugh hired him at Stanford.
In his 44 years of coaching Hart has been a member of 26 bowl teams, including nine Rose Bowl appearances. He was named Footballscoop.com’s defensive line coach of the year in 2012, when his Stanford line led the NCAA and set a school record with 57 sacks.
Along the way, he’s also had to adapt to the changes in the culture, habits and personalities of the football players he coaches and helps recruit.
“The kids today are all looking for quick entertainment, the video games and that stuff,” he said. “So to coach them, you have to be constantly entertaining. You can’t grind them anymore. They still are good kids, and they still like to compete. But some of them come here feeling entitled. I tell them there is no BS in the weight room.”
Recruiting and coaching at Stanford, which has higher academic requirements for its athletes than do many schools, also has its challenges.
“It can be hard at times. You’ve really got to dig under the rocks to find guys who can play but also have the academics,” Hart said. “Stanford kids like to be called tough because not many of them are called tough when they come here. They are called smart.”
Another challenge for college coaches is keeping the players focused on college and not the pros.
“So many games are on TV now, and the money thing is always talked about,” Hart said. “There is no major in college that you can get a degree in that, when you come out of school, you’ll make anything close to what the NFL minimum salary is.”
Hart and Linda, his wife of 42 years, have two sons. John is an insurance man in Seattle, and Jay is a policeman in Bellingham, Wash.
His family has been a part of most of Hart’s 44-year football odyssey.
“Families are the victims, as I call them, of a coaching career,” Hart said. “They are the ones who take the hits when you’re constantly moving around the country. Fortunately we spent 21 years in Seattle, when I was at Washington, so it wasn’t quite as bad for us.”
Hart has been an assistant coach for all of his 44 years in the business.
“When you’re younger, you do think about maybe trying to be a head coach,” he said, “but I realized I wouldn’t be a good head coach. Sometimes my people skills slip me.”
Hart prefers the lunch-pail existence and mentality of the under-the-radar assistant coach, and why not? He’s proven to be one of the best in the country.
“He really has a passion, a knack and a talent for it,” sister Wendy Platzar said. “And he has the integrity to do it the right way. He’s taking boys and turning them into men. Whenever I talk to his former players they tell me he taught them a lot, about football and about life. We’re very proud of what he’s done.”
Today, all the Hart relatives in Willoughby will gather around the TV for the Rose Bowl, wearing their Stanford gear, and hoping for the best.
Two thousand miles away, one of the best football players and certainly the best college coach to ever come out of South High will be doing what he does best — coaching football, in the trenches, the same way he’s coached it for nearly half a century.
“I don’t know how much longer I’ll do it,” he said. “I guess until it’s not fun anymore, or until I’m not as good as I used to be.”